Category Archives: Philosophy

Of the excised poems, “Pourvou Que Ca Doure” perhaps demonstrates a higher degree of poetic merit than most of the other poems. The poem brings together The Double Axe themes of civilization decaying and sick,” natural evolution, and a concern for man’s future. Translated from the French, “provided that it lasts,” the title refers to the last line of the poem, “if man’s back holds,” a line that comments of the burden of rampant corruption men have to bear if life is to continue. Jeffers directs us to “look all around” and see that life grows from death. Things are corrupted: science, art, and statecraft are “famous corpses” “stinking.” Yet everything comes from what precedes it, and the new forms evolve from the old – but only if man can live.

More pale than the clouds as they pass

Thick woven as the weft of a witch is

Round the heart of a thrall that hath sinned,

Whose youth and the wrecks of its riches

Are waifs on the wind.

3

The pastures are herdless and sheepless,

No pasture or shelter for herds :

The wind is relentless and sleepless,

And restless and songless the birds

Their cries from afar fall breathless,

Their wings are as lightnings that flee;

For the land has two lords that are deathless:

Death’s self, and the sea..[“By the North Sea”] is an elaborate metaphor for the act of Apollonian creation and the dominance of art over all transiency. (Robert Peters from The Victorian Experience: The Poets)..Read the complete poem

He who measures gain and loss,

When he gave to thee the Rose,

Gave to me alone the Cross

Where the blood-red blossom blows

In a wood of dew and moss,

There thy wandering pathway goes,

Mine where waters brood and toss;

Yet one joy have I hid close,

He who measures gain and loss,

When he gave to thee the Rose,

Gave to me alone the Cross..N.B.The spiritual symbol of the Rose in mysticism represents consciousness as matter. Consciousness is symbolized as a flowering process and an unfolding manifestation. The flowering of its petals represents man’s divine inner consciousness being revealed as layers of his being open up to reveal the Divine Inner Self..The Rose crucified on the cross is the symbol of the true divinity of humanity. The cross represents the four cardinal points of being in a balanced state. The crossing of the vertical and the horizontal lines represent the conjunction of time and eternity and other opposites. The vertical, being the Spiritual, creative, positive and active aspects of being, and the horizontal, the negative, material and passive aspects. It is at this conjunction point, representing balance and harmony, that the rose flowers and unfolds itself..A reminder that we will celebrate the use of the rose as a poetic symbol or metaphor on January 25, 2018. Please bring your own illustration of this for reading and discussion and, if you wish, post it first on the blog via the CONTACT US page, or email it to me directly..Listen to Sharon Shannon & Mike Scott sing and play “A Song Of The Rosy Cross.”

Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast..How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me..Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day..Were all stars to disappear or die,I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total dark sublime,Though this might take me a little time..

“The More Loving One,” written in 1957, can be read at one level as a poignant, but not particularly complicated, reflection on unrequited love. It is considerably more than that, though: it is an acceptance that in the face of meaninglessness or indifference it is still possible to love.

All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Notes on the mythology behind “Man and the Echo.”

Echo was a nymph who fell in love with Narcissus when she sees him for the first time. Echo reveals herself to Narcissus and he rejects her. Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in a stream, won’t move from his reflection and dies. After his body has wasted away all that is left is a Narcissus flower; a pale flower near the stream.

Echo and Narcissus in the poem could refer to Yeats (Echo) and Maude Gonne (Narcissus) or Yeats (Echo) and Ireland (Narcissus) or Yeats (Echo) and Marguerite (Margot) Ruddock (1907–1951), who used the stage name Margot Collis, an Irish actress, poet and singer. She had a relationship with W. B. Yeats starting in 1934.

“In a cleft that’s christened Alt” is a reference to a hill in Ireland that is supposed to be a Celtic burial ground.

“Echo. Lay down and die,” between stanzas reveals Yeats in conflict with his thoughts.

By John Kaag and Clancy Martin

I HAVE, alas! Philosophy,

Medicine, Jurisprudence too,

And to my cost Theology,

With ardent labour, studied through.

And here I stand, with all my lore,

Poor fool, no wiser than before.

For two professors, the opening words of Goethe’s Faust have always been slightly disturbing, but only recently, as we’ve grown older, have they come to haunt us..

Faust sits in his dusty library, surrounded by tomes, and laments the utter inadequacy of human knowledge. He was no average scholar but a true savant — a master in the liberal arts of philosophy and theology and the practical arts of jurisprudence and medicine. In the medieval university, those subjects were the culminating moments of a lifetime of study in rhetoric, logic, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy..

In other words, Faust knows everything worth knowing. And still, after all his careful bookwork, he arrives at the unsettling realization that none of it has really mattered. His scholarship has done pitifully little to unlock the mystery of human life.

by Danielle CharetteLong before Donald Trump, there was the homegrown demagoguery of Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark. All the King’s Men turns seventy this year, but Warren’s best-known novel seems as prescient as ever. As Governor Stark barnstorms his way across the South, Warren exposes the underbelly of American politics, where the rule of law and state budgets become “like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy.” For Warren’s politician, “it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.”.

Despite his ten novels, Warren thought of himself primarily as a poet, and you can hear his ear for backwater prosody in Stark’s often-cruel populist rhetoric. In this sense, All the King’s Men serves as a kind of primer for approaching Warren’s earthy realism. The poems we find in volumes like Promises and Tale of Time are full of blackened oaks, birds of prey, unnamed fathers and ticking clocks. The “facts” of rustic America can seem backward or painful, but they can also give substance to poetry. For Warren, the honest poet confronts the world before him, without floating off into what Keats called the “egotistical sublime.” The freewheeling ego is a writerly sin he associated with Emerson’s Over-soul, Hemingway’s chauvinists and Jay Gatsby’s romantic fantasies. All are guilty of a “fluidity of selves” and the dangers that come with delusions of grandeur. More often than not, this shapeshifting has a political component. We see it in the bizarre conceit that the son of a New York real-estate mogul speaks for working-class voters abandoned by the “establishment.” Trump’s sudden affection for the everyman marks a nastier rejoinder to 2008, when soaring vagaries like “hope” and “change” propelled President Obama to the White House. Vacant ideals tend to invite civic confusion at best and political thuggery at worst..Read the complete article